


But I'm Still Here

by thesometimeswarrior



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: (me making too much of minor animation choices), Angst, Canon Compliant, Episode: s04e24 I Am My Mom, Ficlet, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-24 17:49:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15635682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesometimeswarrior/pseuds/thesometimeswarrior
Summary: It was me!Pearl wants to shout.It wasn’t him, it wasn’t Rose, it was me!The instant the thoughts grow in her mind, her hands fly to her mouth and bind it tight, a remnant of Pink’s—of Rose’s—last order to her.Pearl, when Steven sacrifices himself to Homeworld.





	But I'm Still Here

Anger, she’s felt before and plenty. (At Yellow and Blue Diamonds, at the Homeworld Gems fighting against them, at Greg for a time…) Anger at _Rose_ , she’s even felt before, though just once, contained somewhere in her fear and her grief. ( _How could you do this to me, Rose? How could you have a baby and just leave me here?!_ ) 

But this, this _fury_ welling up now behind her forcibly closed lips, is entirely new.

 _It was me!_ Pearl wants to shout. _It wasn’t him, it wasn’t Rose, it was me!_ And all the intricacies and nuances of the situation—that Pink Diamond had asked her to do it, that Pink was never shattered, that the part-human, part-Gem being that the Diamonds would ( _will!_ ) surely shatter or kill or maim or torture or worse if ( _when!_ ) they get their hands on him contains her Gem—all these are irrelevant. _I’m the one you want!_ she tries to cry out. _I’m the one the Diamonds want! Take me! Leave him, and take me, and do whatever it is you want to do with renegade Pearls and Diamond shatterers, but just please leave him alone!_

But the instant the thoughts grow in her mind, her hands fly to her mouth and bind it tight, a remnant of Pink Diamond’s—of Rose’s—last order to her. 

( _How could you do this to him?!_ she screams silently to her memory of Pink Diamond. _Why couldn’t you just let me do this for him?!_ )

It's a stupid, silly thought and she knows it. Pink Diamond couldn't have known, then, what would happen now, couldn't have known about Greg or Steven or the Corrupting Light or any of the rest of it. And even if she had, well, Pink was always good at living in the moment, less good at thinking things through. (She _never_ thought things through! _Why_ couldn’t she have just thought things through?!) But for once it's not the rational part of her that's here, at the forefront of her Gem. It's fire, the same shard of her that pushed her to _choose_ to put her own shattering on the line for Rose during the War, even when she had been freed of the obligation.

( _Please let me do this for him,_ she begs now, with that and every other piece of her.)

But it’s a plea in vain. Because all she has left to argue with, to beg, however desperately, is a memory. Because Pink Diamond is _gone_ , and the Rose Quartz she had become is _gone_ , and Steven is, for the moment, here, but he doesn’t know enough to reverse the order and is too much like Rose to let Pearl sacrifice herself for him even if he did. Even though she’d be telling the truth.

And so, as the tears well up in her eyes, the only word she manages to pull out of her protesting mouth is a whispered: “Steven.”

(In this moment, it’s the most important sound she’s ever uttered.)

“I love you,” he says.

Then the door of the ship closes, and Pearl can only bob silently in the water, as, for the second time in her existence, the one she had sworn to protect disappears from in front of her and is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! I live for comments!


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